> no one knew how to even convincingly fake a natural language interaction.

There was some decent attempts at the turing test given limited subject matter long before LLM’s. As in people looking at the conversation where unsure if one of the parties was a computer. It’s really interesting to read some of those transcripts.

LLM’s actually score worse one some of those tests. Of course they do a huge range of other things, but it’s worth understanding both their strengths and many weaknesses.